by Everett True
“You didn’t lose any band members over this,” Kurt shoots back, annoyed.
“Not over this,” Courtney replies. “But my band lost two members. You can make what you want out of it, and say that you were ruining my life. Where’s the theory that you’re the one wearing the pants? That you’re running me into the ground? Nobody’s come up with that theory. You haven’t been victimised with the whole macho guy persona.”
“I’d rather be in your position than to be thought of as a fucking idiot,” complains Kurt, “a puppet on a string, being manipulated 24 hours a day. You didn’t lose your band members over anything connected with this marriage, or by being associated with me at all . . .”
“I’m not saying I did . . .”
“I’ve lost more drummers than you have,” Kurt points out.
It’s interesting that Courtney should raise this point about the imbalance in your relationship. Someone remarked to me recently that they think Kurt Cobain is one of the biggest sexists in America.
Kurt becomes seriously upset.
“That’s not true,” Courtney says, leaping to his defence. “No. I’ve looked for it, but not at all.”
“A comment like that is just such a pathetic last attempt at having some kind of opinion . . .” starts a riled Kurt, before I cut him off.
No, hold on. I think what they’re referring to is your relationship – the way it’s so effectively castrated Courtney’s art (especially when Courtney was such a strong female role model before her marriage). The comment wasn’t meant to be a reflection on you – just on the way people perceive your marriage.
“Right,” says Kurt. “I don’t understand why that happens.”
“The whole thing of the media theorising on two people’s relationships,” says Courtney, “is my fault for allowing journalists into my home. I see now why people say, ‘I’m not going to talk about my famous husband.’ I understand now. We’ve become these two cartoon characters you can theorise about . . .”
She stops, and starts on a different tack.
“You can’t please everybody,” she says. “I don’t care if I get criticised. I don’t give a shit if I get a bad review. I don’t care if people say I’m a bitch or I’m obnoxious, cos I am those things. Or that thing of being a witch, or that [Melody Maker features editor] Paul Lester guy saying I’m ugly and [minor US chart star] Debbie Gibson’s pretty . . . I fucking think that shit’s funny. It’s this crazy lying. Do you understand?”
She’s starting to rail again now.
“It’s my life,” she says, almost spelling the words out.
“A social worker coming into my hospital trying to take my baby away from me, trying to take my baby away from me. Spending hundreds of thousand of dollars on lawyers . . . Whatever. I know it sounds crazy . . .”
She pauses, takes another breath.
“The Vanity Fair article put quotes in my mouth, there were things I was supposed to have said about Madonna that I never said,” she continues. “They twisted things around.
“I didn’t do heroin during pregnancy. And even if I did, even if I shot coke every night and took acid every day, it’s my own motherfucking business. If I’m immoral, I’m immoral. It’s not your goddamn business if I’m immoral or not.”
She pauses, trying to sort her words out.
“A photographer for Vanity Fair caught me smoking a cigarette. It was on my birthday. I smoked something like four cigarettes in six hours. I was smoking a cigarette in one of the pictures. And the lines around the block for magazines that wants that picture is so big that this motherfucker has charged me $50,000 to get the pictures back. It’s blackmail, pure and simple blackmail. And if I don’t get them, they’ll keep after her [Frances Bean].”
In some states in America, these photographs would be enough to prove that Courtney is ‘unfit to mother’, thus giving the State legal rights to remove the child into their custody.
“They filed a legal report on me based on Vanity Fair and nothing else, no other fucking evidence, that I was an unfit mother,” she continues. “That I smoked during my pregnancy. Fuck you. Everybody smokes during their pregnancy – who gives a shit? And it’s all because I married Kurt, because he’s hot, young and cute.
“And I certainly don’t buy people worrying about the baby,” she adds. “If you want to ask about my drug problem, go ask my big fat smart 10-pound daughter, she’ll answer any questions you have about it.”
“I just want to get back to the Kurt-complaining-about-his-success thing,” says Kurt, interrupting his wife’s flow of invective. “How many questions in every article are placed on my success? People are so obsessed with it, that’s all I ever get a chance to talk about. Ten different variations on the same question every interview.”
“You funny little boy!” Courtney squeals, mocking his tormenters. “You didn’t set out to be successful! What an angle! Cinderella!”
“It’s a fine scam, it’s a fine image,” he says, sarcastically. “I’m getting really fucking bored with it.”
“Why don’t we switch?” Courtney says, bringing the interview full circle. “I’ll be demure and sullen and you’ll be loud and obnoxious.”
Then you’d be Axl Rose.
“No, then I’d be his codpiece,” she corrects me. “ Fuck me Kurt, fuck me Julian, fuck me Julian’s drum tech, make me feel my worth! It’s ridiculous. And, for $50,000, I have to buy this image of a really pregnant woman with a garland in her hair smoking a cigarette, this whole fertility image with a cigarette. As if I did it deliberately, as if I did it to provoke!”
She’s off again.
“Someone called up my manager after the Vanity Fair article, saying, ‘Does Courtney think she’s being that whole Seventies cool shock rock thing?’ – as if I had planted this whole drug, cigarette sensationalism!
“Ask Kurt,” she continues. “I didn’t want to talk to Vanity Fair, because I knew it was based on the Madonna thing and our marriage. They don’t even do rock people – I sell 60,000 records, what the fuck do they want with me? But I did it anyway, because I was so sick of industry women talking and saying terrible things about me.
“I thought, if I was in Vanity Fair, it would shut their fucking mouths and they’d leave me in peace,” she laments. “But that was my mistake and I just shouldn’t have done it. I should have known more about the mainstream press and how they operate.
“Also, the whole thing where it made me seem to be so competitive with Kat [ Bjelland] is just like . . . I was totally provoked. I was mad with Kat about something, and I got provoked into gossiping about something off the record.”
According to Vanity Fair, Kat and Courtney are embroiled in a bitter argument over who started wearing the ‘baby doll’ kinderwhore dress both are famous for. Kat was quoted as saying, “Last night I had a dream that I killed her. I was really happy.”
“And then she provoked Kat into saying things about me, by telling her what I said,” Courtney continues. “If you notice, Kat hasn’t gone on record as saying anything shitty about me, and I certainly didn’t mean to go on record saying anything shitty about her. We’re not best friends any more, but we don’t hate each other. It’s ridiculous that it’s been turned into something where you have to choose between one of us. We’re different. We write differently.
“But that’s why it’s so competitive,” she adds. “That’s why this whole foxcore/ Riot Grrrl thing is so competitive. It’s like rap music. There’s a void, and there’s only room for one of you in the void.”
The tape switches off. Courtney decides she’s said enough. Kurt nods in agreement. Time to view the new Nirvana video once more, and discuss whether to go out tonight. Irish rock band Therapy? are playing the Whisky-A-Go-Go.
Courtney decides to accompany me – the first time she’s been out in LA since giving birth.
Kurt prefers to stay in, and mind the baby.
NOTES
1 Lead singer of The Staple Singers, Mavis had
a soulful gospel contralto. The album Kurt was playing was the Steve Cropper-produced Mavis Staples (1969).
2 “ ‘I really do not like myself much and feel guilty for even expressing myself,’ ” said Pavement singer Stephen Malkmus to me once, quoting. “That’s the classic line everyone comes out with. I feel like that and I’m sure the Kurt Cobains of this world also do. What are you supposed to say? I Hate Myself And I Want To Die is a great title for a Nirvana album. It’s a shame he didn’t use it. What can you do? Love yourself and start to live.”
3 Madonna’s record label Maverick is best known for signing multi-million-selling whiny Canadian pop star Alanis Morissette.
CHAPTER 24
Foetuses And Seahorses
“KURT’s a vampire,” states Jennifer Finch.
He’s a what?
“I think that Kurt was a great melody writer,” explains the former L7 bassist, “but he lacked a lot of real life experience and the ability to really tell a story and communicate a specific solidarity of what he was thinking. Courtney is a master at that. She’s a great songwriter; she’s a great lyricist; she’s a great writer. At a certain point, it became mutually beneficial. I think so many people think that Kurt elevated her as an artist, or as a personality. I tend to question that. What do you think?”
“That’s interesting,” comments Seattle photographer Charles Peterson, “because Kurt has the emotion, but for the most part his lyrics are nonsensical. I remember telling Jonathan [ Poneman] that Sub Pop should print the lyrics to Bleach because no one could understand what Kurt was on about. He replied, ‘No. The lyrics are nonsense, so that would backfire.’ ”
I’ve got a Nirvana songbook for piano and it’s like . . .
“‘I’m a mosquito/ My libido’,” laughs Jennifer. “I see what you’re saying.”
“Courtney’s a real storyteller,” agrees Charles. “She takes you into an environment and creates it in a very solid imagery that is mixed with what can be interpretive and what isn’t. Like, ‘The lamp is blue’.”
He pauses: “Do you think that translated into Kurt’s personal life of being unable to talk about things?”
“There would be times where Kurt would be very specific and communicative,” replies Jennifer, “and other times where he couldn’t communicate anything about what his needs were. He was very much a veil of chaos, of non-specific emotion. Courtney would be like, ‘I need this to happen. I need this to feel comfortable.’ ”
How would you describe Courtney? Imagine I’ve never met her.
“There’s not a single sentence that can engulf it,” she says. “The wind blows and it changes, it becomes different people. I still think she never should have gone out with Kurt.”
On December 15, DGC released Incesticide – a collection of BBC sessions, demos, outtakes and unreleased songs. The record company had been hoping to put out a new album, but Kurt hadn’t even started writing the lyrics for his latest songs. Plus, Nirvana wanted to sort out the ‘real fans’ among their audience, testing their loyalty by releasing material that wasn’t as immediately accessible as Nevermind . The fans weren’t found wanting. Even with little promotion, the album sold 500,000 copies within two months and went on to sell 3.2 million copies worldwide. But, as one might expect, the quality of the songs varied.
“Christ,” Kurt wrote in the original press release about ‘Aero Zeppelin’. “Let’s just throw together some heavy metal riffs in no particular order and give it a quirky name in homage to a couple of our favourite masturbatory Seventies rock acts.”1 The track does indeed sound heavy, dated, a throwback to another time when Kurt and Krist were greatly influenced by their immediate peers, specifically Soundgarden. Likewise ‘Mexican Seafood’ and ‘Hairspray Queen’, both also lifted from the Dale demo – although here, the main touch point is Scratch Acid.
“Their inclusion griped me for a while because I wish I’d had a chance to remix them,” Jack Endino comments about the songs.2 “They literally took the tape from the first day I recorded them, when we mixed 10 songs in one hour, and put it on Incesticide. They didn’t give me a chance to clean them up at all.”
Far better are the tracks culled from UK singles such as ‘Sliver’ and ‘Dive’, the former blistering with angst, the latter one of the finest songs Nirvana recorded with its naïve Olympian imagery and churning bass line.3 ‘Stain’, too, is a relentless catalogue of disturbance and alienation, worthy of an early Ramones lyric. The next handful of songs I can take or leave: ‘Turnaround’ barely varies from the Devo blueprint, and I always preferred The Vaselines’ originals of ‘Molly’s Lips’ and ‘Son Of A Gun’ to Nirvana’s straight ahead tributes. The sped-up, almost throwaway ‘(New Wave) Polly’, drawn from the Mark Goodier sessions, pales next to the Nevermind version, a studio experiment that probably shouldn’t have been allowed to see the light of day. ‘Beeswax’ and ‘Downer’ are fine, but didn’t need reviving. ‘Big Long Now’ failed to make it on to Bleach – and with good reason. It’s a mournful, sub-Melvins slow grind.
Pretty much the finest song is the final one, ‘Aneurysm’ – also from the Mark Goodier session – a manic, impassioned start gives way to a heavy drumbeat and Kurt screaming out his feelings of love for Tobi Vail. You don’t need to understand the words to relate to the emotion. Kurt’s voice connects on a fundamental, gut level.
The sleeve featured Kurt Cobain artwork: a troubling painting of a skeletal figure and distorted baby-like creature with a masked face – the larger of the apparitions is holding a couple of red poppies. The mood is sombre, hints at betrayal – both familial (hence the album’s ‘joke’ title) and general. There’s precious little emotion, more a feeling of cold rejection.
The back cover, meanwhile, is a close-up of a yellow rubber duck.
In the sleeve notes, Kurt recounts the story of a trip he took to the Rough Trade record shop off Portobello Road in west London in search of the first Raincoats album. It wasn’t in stock, but the shop assistant knew The Raincoats’ former violin-player Ana de Silva – and told him that Ana worked at an antique shop nearby. So she drew Kurt a map, and off he set.
“Sometime later,” he wrote, “I arrived at this elfin shop filled with something else I’ve compulsively searched for over the past few years – really old, fucked up, marionette-like wood-carved dolls. I’ve fantasised about finding a shop filled with so many. They wouldn’t accept my credit card but the dolls were way too expensive anyway. Ana was there, however, so I politely introduced myself with a fever-red face and explained the reason for my intrusion. I can remember her boss almost setting me on fire with his glares. She said, ‘Well, I may have a few lying around so, if I find one, I’ll send it to you’ (very polite, very English). I left feeling like a dork, like I had violated her space, like she probably thought my band was tacky.”
A few weeks later, Kurt received a vinyl copy of The Raincoats album through the post, complete with Xeroxed lyrics, pictures and signatures. “It made me happier,” he wrote, “than playing in front of thousands of people each night, rock-god idolisation from fans, music industry plankton kissing my ass and the million dollars I made last year.”
Kurt went on to detail all the other small instances where he felt his fame had been a blessing – the drawings he’d been sent by Daniel Johnston4, The Stinky Puffs5 single Jad Fair’s stepson Simon had posted to him, playing on the same bill as Wipers’ singer Greg Sage in LA, being asked to produce the new Melvins record, being given a signed first edition of revered junkie beat poet William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, being sent a Mazzy Star LP6, playing ‘The Money Will Roll Right In’ with Mudhoney, kissing Krist and Dave on Saturday Night Live “just to spite homophobes”, meeting Iggy Pop, playing with bands like The Breeders, Urge Overkill, TV Personalities, the ever-riotous Jesus Lizard, Hole, Dinosaur Jr . . .
“While all these things are very special,” he explained, “none were half as rewarding as having a baby with a person who is the supreme example of dignity, et
hics and honesty. My wife challenges injustice and the reason her character has been so severely attacked is because she chooses not to function the way the white corporate man insists. His rules for women involve her being submissive, quiet and non-challenging. When she doesn’t follow his rules, the threatened man gets scared.”
On January 1, 1993 Kurt did a photo shoot dressed in his pyjamas, at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seattle, for a cover story for The Advocate. “It was nice,” remembers Charles Peterson. “There were no publicity people, I didn’t have an assistant. There was no hair and make-up. That was in the hotel they were staying in downtown, at Pike Place Market.” Kurt was noticeably open in the article, flattered to be interviewed by a gay magazine7: talking freely about his wife, his band, his drug use, the hatred he felt towards Lynn Hirschberg and his business dealings.
“Courtney comes across in the press as the Nancy Reagan of this relationship,” journalist Keith Allman commented. “It’s just sick,” Kurt replied. “God! I don’t want to say something like, ‘Well, if anything, I wear the pants in the house.’ We have influence on each other. It’s totally 50-50. Courtney insists on this: she has a tab when she borrows money from me that she has to pay back [this wasn’t strictly true]. She’s only up to $6,000. We’re millionaires, and she goes to Jet Rag [an LA vintage clothing shop] and buys clothes – $5 dresses. Big deal! I’ll gladly buy her some $5 dresses.”
Kurt revealed that he and Courtney spent a million dollars the previous year: $80,000 on personal expenses, $380,000 to the taxman, $300,000 on the house in Carnation, and the rest on doctors and lawyers. “That’s including car rentals, food, everything,” he said. “That’s not very much; that’s definitely not what Axl [Rose] spends a year.”